At 01:31 AM 9/16/97 -0700, KNAPPEN@MZDMZA.ZDV.UNI-MAINZ.DE wrote:
>Does the IANA currently discriminate between _character set_ and _content
>transfer encoding_ in a way similar as MIME does?
Unfortunately, it does not. It is used to register both coded character
sets (CCSs) and character encoding systems (CESs). Content transfer encoding
is outside the scope of this registration. UCS-4, UCS-2, UTF-7, UTF-8, etc.
are viewed as character encoding systems applied to coded character sets,
rather than a transfer encoding. One can apply a transfer encoding as an
additional transformation on these CES forms.
>It will be very helpful to have different tags for the character set itself
>and the transformation format.
I agree; unfortunatly the mechansim is already in place and being used in
widespread applications. The authors of MIME are quite adamant about keeping
it as it is, even with its flaws which they do recognize. One way around this
is to establish documented conventions for CHARSET names such as those found
in RFC1641 "Using Unicode with MIME".
Regards,
Glenn Adams
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:36 EDT